Humans of Martech

Data, data everywhere! If this conjures up the green vertical parade of binary numbers from the Matrix, you’re not alone in being confused. You might be thinking -- I didn’t sign up for this! You didn’t go to school for statistical analysis, so what makes you qualified to produce a marketing report? There’s a lot that makes you qualified to produce reports, even if you don’t feel like an expert. Marketers, particularly in smaller companies, need to learn enough to be dangerous. The main takeaway for this episode: you need to incorporate reporting into your skillset, and it’s not as scary as you think.IntroWe both have a background working at an analytics companySo much hype around data over the years, whether it’s big or smallIt can be super intimidating thinking you need to be responsible for reporting, and it’s way too easy to overcomplicate thingsThe difference between analytics and reportingThe terms are used interchangeably so often that it’s hard to really understand the difference.I think that one way to think about reporting and analytics -- for reporting, you’ll almost always have a clear understanding on what you need to report on.Analytics, you’ll likely be exploring data and not always sure what you’ll find. This is where having a data analyst is useful -- they can look at a data set and tell you if an insight is relevant or meaningful. Performance and exploration. That’s how I see the difference between reporting and analytics. Most startups don’t have time to prioritize either. But in the venture backed startup world, comes a bit more process and a board of directors that ask for monthly/quarterly reporting updates. A really nice sweet spot for learning to become dangerous is a bootstrapped startup that doesn’t have a big data team or requirements for long tedious reporting processes. But regardless of the environment that you’re in, marketers need to learn these skills if for nothing else -- to be able to show their worth, their impact on key metrics. Every marketer needs some reporting skillsWhere the heck do you start with this skillset?Confusion of reporting and analytics has marketers overengineering solutions to some simple problems. No, you don’t need to learn R and statistical analysis to be effective at reportingThink of analytics as exploring data for unknown insights and buried treasure. We can think of reporting as being accountable for the things you get paid to do.Start there. All my marketing reporting comes back to the question: is what I’m doing making a difference? Reporting on anything else is purely intellectual.So this sounds simple right? Show your impact… Reality is that different marketers will have access to different tools and metrics. But as soon as you start talking about marketing reporting, you quickly get to attribution and then multi touch points and you get lost really easy in all the noise and options of reporting.How do you get to what’s important?This is the ultimate question, and where you as a marketer are incredibly importantThe absolute best data analysts on the planet are the best because they can tie all that data and insight back to business strategyYou need to be able to answer business questions with your reportingYou should start simple. The marketing funnel is the ideal starting point for understanding marketing reporting. Map each stage of the funnel to a marketing metric and then start to fill in the data.For example, Awareness is the total sum of impressions across advertising and social media and interest is all web sessions.Boom - you’re already starting to get somewhere. This is how nearly every marketer structures their reporting and strategy. Start at the top of the funnel and work your way to revenue.Yeah we had a full series on lifecycle, starting at episode 12, check that out. You don’t need to be able to report on end to end multi attribution from the start. Small steps. Conversion rates from one stage of the funnel to the next is an awesome starting point. Even just focusing on one slice of the funnel.Lifecycle reportingWe both know that getting to revenue data isn’t always that easySales and marketing systems often come loaded with data issues or caveats around the processImpressions and sessions are easy to get -- log in to Google Analytics, your digital ads platforms, etc, and throw those numbers togetherThings can get hairy when you start working with contacts, deals, and new customersThis is where lifecycle is so key. You need a set of common definitions to even start getting to reporting nirvana. If you and sales don’t agree on what constitutes an MQL, it’s going to be hard to be successful creating good reports. The lifecycle series goes super deep into how to set all this up.Lifecycle reporting is probably one of the most useful ways to report on marketing data. This is definitely high level reporting and should map to your strategy quite nicely. As you progress through each stage, you get a series of conversion rates and baselines. Ultimately lifecycle reporting answers the question how effective you are at turning sessions into contacts and then customers.I love this narrative, that lifecycle is at the heart of growth marketing.It’s so easy to over-complicate reporting.One thing that makes things tricky is where your data lives. Lifecycle reporting sounds straightforward, number of impressions > number of views > number of signups… but often you’ll get a different number of signups from your crm compared to your goal in GA compared to your automation system.Every marketer will work with a tool that provides dataGetting the most out of in-app analyticsFirst step in journey to reporting mastery is learning the tools you use on a daily basisHow do you get good at in-app reporting? You see all the time the first thing students do is go out and grab a certification for Google Analytics, etc, etc… Certifications are totally worth it and you should go ahead and do it. Don’t worry if it’s worth it or not. The truth of these certificates is that they demonstrate that you’ve: a) put in the effort to learn an application, and b) learned the fundamentals of a tool.It doesn’t make you an expert -- yet -- and you’ll need to apply those skills to real-world problems to truly master those skills. I learned these tools by always being the guy people came to ask questions. “How many visitors did we get from Organic this month? Is that an improvement?”“What percentage of our traffic is on mobile?”“How many trials did we get last month? Where on our website did they start trials?You don’t need the answer, but you do need the curiosity and discipline to dig deeper.This is one of the reasons I think early marketers should spend time in small startups. You won’t come close to the amount of time or freedom to dig deeper in a big enterprise where tools and data teams are already full fledged.Learning through trying and breaking things right?What makes someone good at reporting?But the data never lies! It might be true but like a rock on the side of a hill, it requires some context and big picture thinking to understand how it got thereSo much of marketing reporting is done on an ad-hoc basis as opposed to a formal month-end style. Of course, you ...

Shannon McCluskey is an analytical marketing leader at the top of her game counting 10+ years of martech experience with amazing SaaS companies.She works out of Vancouver but is originally from Ottawa, she’s got a Bcom from the UofO and a masters in digital technology from university of Waterloo.She got her early start in marketing and UX at Fluidware, an Ottawa based startup with the same founders that are now behind Fellow.appFluidware was later acquired by SurveyMonkey where Shannon went on to spend almost 3 years in marketing ops where she worked with some of the top Marketo experts in the world.She went on to run the remote Ops team at an HR SaaS called Visier for almost 4 years.Shannon is currently Marketing Ops Manager at Clio - a distributed cloud-based legal tech company and she’s building an awesome team with interesting open roles right now.She’s certified by Marketo, Salesforce and Demandbase. She’s spoken at top marketing conferences like the martech conference in San Jose.Shannon-- thanks for taking the time to chat with us today!- Your journey from Ottawa startup to Survey Monkey > Visier and now Clio - What's Clio and what does your team do, how do you market to lawyers - How a remote company of 600 people is run, how your MOPs team is run - What advice do you have for aspiring MOPs professionals? How do you know this path is right for you?- Are you getting lots of applications, what are your thoughts on the supply and demand of martech talen right now?- Describe the current role / pitch the opportunity on your team- Give us an example a project someone on your team would own, like a campaign a nurture, a data hygiene program or a compliance program - In the posting, the JT is specialist, but looking at the exp and the skills required, you’re considering both early marketers willing to learn at the same time as a more seasoned IC with MKTO + SFDC experience. How do you balance that, how do you pick?- The stack you're building with- You lead a team, you're a frequent speaker and a constant learner, you also have a busy personal life, you’re a mom working from home, how do you balance everything you have going on in your life to stay happy. --Shannon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonmccluskeyThe Marketing Operations Specialist posting: https://boards.greenhouse.io/goclio/jobs/3142437 All job openings on Clio: https://boards.greenhouse.io/goclio ✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw

Hey everyone, this is part 3 of 3 on marketing email audits. Whether you’re in-house or you’re consulting and want to offer email audits as a service, our hope is that you can level up your email game.In the last 2 episodes, we covered research tips and questions you should ask yourself before the audit and we also covered the actual audit and what to look for, tips and tactics. In today’s episode, we’ll cover what email improvements to suggest and experiment with, we’ll take a nice deep dive in behaviour-triggered emails.So you’ve dived into the user’s world, you’ve gone through all the emails and suggested improvements on the first emails and how to avoid selling too early. Now you want to figure out what you should suggest in terms of improvements.What are some of the highest impact experiments you’ve led? One spot I like to start is inactive users. When it comes to reactivating users, B2C can be very similar to B2B. B2C calls them abandoned cart emails, and they don’t have to be treated too differently in SaaS B2B, but it’s easy to do this wrong.Re-activating dormant usersBy day 3-4 of your onboarding sequence, it makes total sense to sell but probably only to users who have gotten started. 50-70% of free users have either left the product or are kicking the tires on several other options. We call these dormant or inactive users. They check you out really fast and give up. The majority of these are users you will never convert in the first place.But amongst this group of inactive users there's plenty who would convert if they get invited back into the product. The approach needs to be creative and helpful. We need to delight these inactive users, not sell them.The angle should rather be showcasing similar customers who have completed similar jobs to be done.Triggered-based behaviour emailsMost onboarding series are not tied to what users have completed so far in the product, it’s 100% time-based and not outcome-driven and assumes all users are ready to buy 15 minutes into their journey. Outcome driven trigger-based emails (instead of time), based on what users have completed and not completed in the product.Here’s how I’ve approached implementing this as an experiment:I would suggest starting with 3 main cohorts of users: DiscoverGetting startedUpgradeMost series push users quickly past steps 1 and 2 and hammers step 3 for many emails to follow. (1) DiscoverThe first activity cohort (Discover) is all about getting users to their first unit of value. For Convertkit, that might be importing your subscribers from Mailchimp, or maybe creating their first form. This is all about getting users to a quick win, browse all the different signup form options and connect it to your site. Instead of waiting 15 minutes before the next email, a triggered email could send after sign up form creation congratulating the user on connecting Convertkit to their site, reminding them how easy it is to swap forms and pushing them to the next cohort of users.If users who signup become inactive and are not able to create a signup form or do anything else after 15 minutes, it’s safe to assume we’ve lost these folks and instead of pushing them a discount or a promotion, we should be teasing them about existing customer signup pages, focusing on that first win. We need to re-activate these users before we worry about selling to them. Coordinate with the product team here for best results. What is the typical time to conversion event. Also, it is worth thinking about consequences and complexity of moving to an activated track or not.(2) Getting startedUsers enter the second activity cohort/group as soon as they complete their first unit of value. The stage is all about convincing users the product is the ideal solution and pushes them through the rest of the getting started steps. This is where email onboarding can help drive stickiness of the product by building/introducing habit-forming principles.Over time, this section can grow with multiple onboarding steps, but we could start with two simple steps like creating their first email draft or their email footer settings. (3) Upgrade to paid planNow that users have had a chance to try out the product and see parts of their brand in the product, we can start nudging them to upgrade benefits and features. Okay so all 3 of those could be lists in your automation tool. Smart lists or dynamic lists, they update as soon as someone completes an action in the product. Yeah so let’s illustrate this. We have our 5 lists right?SignupsImported subscribersCreated a formConnected form to siteCreated broadcast draftUser signs up, they get a confirmation email. As soon as they click that, send the Welcome email. So far, no segmentation.Next wait step triggers when the user enters our second list, the getting started list. This is when users have imported their subscribers in Convertkit. So we can wait until the user enters our second list, as soon as they do, they get a congratulatory email pushing them to enter list #3. We can add a max wait time on this wait step and send an email pushing users to import their subscribers after 2 hours if they aren’t on our second list yet.Next wait step would be wait until user enters our 3rd list, created a form, congratulate them and push them to connect it to their site. If user is on list 2, send them another attempt at nudging them to the next product step, if they are on list 1, nudge them to import their contacts. Segmen...

Hey everyone, this is part 2 of 3 on marketing email audits. Whether you’re in-house or you’re consulting and want to offer email audits as a service, our hope is that you can level up your email game.In the last episode, we covered research tips and questions you should ask yourself before the audit. In today’s episode, we’ll cover the actual audit and what to look for, tips and tactics. Next week, our last episode of the series will cover what email improvements to suggest and experiment with.Alright JT, let’s get to it. There’s three crucial things I want to make sure we cover today as part of any email audit.A theme that you’ll hear throughout today’s episode is timing your emails around your user’s journey, and not selling too early or to users that aren’t ready to buy. But let's start with the confirmation email and the welcome email. Regardless of what you're auditing, those will be part of the starting journey for all new users right?Confirmation emailDepending on the scope of your audit you need to decide if you’re going to audit individual emails or more high level improvements. I prefer the former. I go email by email, not starting with the Welcome email but the confirmation email. That’s really the first email touch point. We want to maximise the chances that this email reaches the inbox. To do that we want to keep it short and simple with a single CTA, confirm your email. We don’t want too many images or text or links. We need this to land in the inbox and get through most spam filters.Such a balance of beautiful design and impact versus sneaking past email filters. Too much HTML gets caught.Welcome emailWe had a full episode dedicated to really making this email stand out, and that’s the core goal of this email. Everyone expects it. Most companies have a huge fancy HTML template with heavy brand and a bunch of helpful resources and links to get started.The danger with overloading users too soonSomething that lives rent free in my brain when I think email onboarding is Val Geisler’s dinner party strategy. When you host people over for a dinner party--be it a backyard BBQ or a fancy social event, the evening itself has many tracks. You welcome guests, Take their coats, introduce them to othersYou take their drinks order and show them to a seatthere’s the appetizer round, a main course, side dishes, and dessert, and then you invite them back. If the Welcome email has 10+ links to tutorials and courses and help articles, it’s almost like your guest’s arrive to your house for the dinner party and before they can take their coats off you shove the main course sprinkled with dessert in their face. I like this dinner guest analogy a lot. I think it's also a lot about coordinating with product. Combined, you set the ambience. The smell of food, the setting, the dress code -- email needs to blend in to the decorum. Seeing how the product<>email experience jive is a big opportunity.Instead of overwhelming users with links, Welcome emails are great starting points to train users to open the next emails. This can be done with storytelling and standing out. We should be training users to open our next email and pushing them to 1 specific moment of delight back in the product. Consider a stronger CTA to push users to finish their onboarding. They could try "Add your first subscriber" or "build your first landing page" instead of "Log in".There's an opportunity to tell the Convertkit story instead of just welcoming them to the family. Users starting an email tool are also trialing competitors. So they are getting similar emails. Selling too earlyEarly in the journey we want to nudge users to complete steps in the product that nudge them to moments of delight and getting value from the product. You don’t want to turn off users and start selling to everyone, especially not users that haven’t done much in the product yet. The best way to get users to upgrade to a paid plan is to let them try the product and reach success. Instead of talking about the benefits of upgrading to a paid plan right away, we should be telling users how and why Convertkit is their best choice.We want to be delighting the user and making sure they are accomplishing tasks in the product. Working on the user's timeline rather than asking them to upgrade right away. Mindlessly forcing people through a user journey is bad. The idea that you need to be everything to everyone is equally bad. Segmentation is key, behaviour based triggered emails are also key. That’s actually part 3/3 of our series. We covered what to do before the audit in part 1, part 2 was the actual audit and the most important aspects of the first two emails in your sequence and part 3 next week is what you should be suggesting as part of improvements. We’ll specifically be touching on segmentation and behaviour based triggered emails. Chat then.✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw

Educational series, product onboarding, upsell sequences… regardless of where you look in your funnel, there’s marketing emails to be audited. Like any investigation, an email audit combines thorough observations, deductive reasoning and extra points for style and bold decisions. Our hope with this 3 part series is that you can add another feather in your detective hat. Whether you’re consulting and want to offer email audits as a service or you’re in-house and you want to level up your company’s email game. We’re going to cover research and questions you should ask yourself before the audit, what to look for in your actual audit, tips, tactics and finally what improvements to suggest and experiment with.Today’s main takeaway is:Users have ideal paths to discovering your product or service, understand these moments deeply and use email to guide users along this path. Alright JT, email onboarding is close to my heart, I’ve built many of these in-house but I’ve also had the pleasure of consulting and auditing the onboarding series for a few SaaS and tech companies.It’s fascinating to get to see all the different ways you can welcome users to your product via email.Before we talk about what order to tackle things, let’s talk about great email onboarding.What’s great onboarding?Great email onboarding consists of guiding/helping users through a series of “aha” moments as they interact with your brand and product. Users receive units of value for each step as they gain confidence in the product’s ability to complete their jobs to be done. In a product-led company, this should be corroborated by the product/ux team. What wow moments exist in the ideal path, and use email to guide them along this path.Data is part 1, story is part 2 and where marketing shines. What are some examples of aha moments?Aha moments exampleI’ve been thinking through what an “aha” series of steps might look like for a free Convertkit user:A close friend recommends Convertkit as the ideal place to start for my newsletterI have a quick read through backlinko’s guide to convertkit and get a real good sense of what the product can doI’m able to quickly signup and import my subscribers from MailchimpI’m able to build my first signup form and connect it to my WP siteI watch a 20 minute video tutorial on intro to advanced automations in Pro plansI successfully connect my signup form to my WP siteWhat email onboarding should and should not beUltimately, great email onboarding convinces users to stick around and boosts overall engagement and retention.Email onboarding should be used to:Tell the company’s storyAnswer questions/objectionsDemonstrate how the product solves user’s pain Nudge users to specific common conversion actionsShow the art of the possibleTie what the user has done in their accountEmail onboarding should not be used to:Get everyone to buy immediately Send the same call to actionSeem cold and impersonalAn extension of your brand and productCoordinate with product experience to be integrated with itDoesn’t trip over the feet of product-based emails or sales emailsBuild trust/rapportBe referenceable down the line when user needs info, point of contact, etcUnderstanding your customers and usersBefore diving into any email audit, it’s important to get into your users’ headspace. Obviously this differs whether you're leading this audit in-house or as a consultant. Often when you are contracting, you won’t have a ton of customer research data available to you. In spite of customer research/interviews and jobs to be done insights, here’s a few places to spend a bit of time reading:Review sites on G2, capterraTutorials on getting started with the product from the communitySearching on twitter @company threadsThese spots really give me a sense of the language used and what problems are being solved as well the steps users need to take to be able to “hire” the company for a specific job. Gimme some JBTD examples with something like Covnertkit?Jobs to be done exampleUsers signup for Convertkit probably because they want to grow their personal brands, sites and businesses. Not because they want an email marketing tool. Some of the common themes and jobs that were highlighted throughout reviews and tutorials were:How to build an email listSend automated email remindersSell services/contact or products/ecommerceBuild a personal brand, start an audience, build a web presenceThe predominant themes and categories of use cases were:Artists, designers, filmmakers, photographersAthletes, coaches, influencersMarketers, bloggers, podcasters, makersYoutubers, streamers, musiciansDiving deep into a few tutorials highlighted a few prerequisites for hitting what are likely common conversion actions or moments of delight in the early web building journey:Having a subscriber baseHaving a form connected to your site to accept new subsShare a link to your new landing page on socialSend a broadcast email to subsUnderstanding the customer pain point precisely the moment before they start looking for you.So we just covered part 1 of our 3 part series on email audits, we talked about what great email onboarding should and should not do, we gave you spots to look for user research when there’s a whole lot to start with, and we chatted a bit about jobs to be done and user pain points. Part 2 next week dives into the email audit itself, specifically what you should be looking for in the first two emails. Catch you next time. ✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw

Back to office, staying fully remote, flexible hybrid setup. Global pandemics gave millions of knowledge workers the taste of remote work. And a lot of them are never going back.A global distributed workforce means access to untapped talent but it also means time zone and synchronous meeting challenges. Getting everyone from your local Toronto office to show up to the same meeting at 10am EST is pretty easy. Running the same meeting with a team spread across 5 time zones makes this much more challenging. Especially if you want to promote autonomous and flexible work schedules.The solution isn’t less meetings or hybrid meetings. The solution is asynchronous communication.In today’s episode we’re going to cover what async means exactly, being able to say “I’ll get that done on my own time”. We’ll dispel some of the misconceptions and dive into the stages of transformation towards autonomy. Hopefully you’ll be better positioned to encourage async in your day to day, whether you're in-house or freelance adapting now is key for leading any teams in the future.IntroHundreds of companies declared themselves remote first and digital first last year. A lot of them are massive corporations too. This transition will be excruciatingly slow and painful for big orgs. These orgs are studying companies who have been doing this for decades. Remote work isn’t new for everyone. Convertkit, Close, Basecamp (60+ actually much lower with recent policy changes), Helpscout, Clearbit, Buffer, Doist (100+) and Zapier is 500 people, remote-first all smaller, very little funding, innovators in the remote space.There’s also the bigger teams too.Automattic, the people behind WordPress are 1,000+ global distributed team and have been from the early days. InVision is fully remote, 1000+, GitHub is 3,000+.Something all of these distributed work pioneers talk about is over-communication in the written form, but specifically, asynchronous communication. In the world of most marketers, and knowledge workers for that matter, very little of your day to day tasks are emergencies, or require immediate action.The nature of async can be summed with a short sentence: I’ll get to that as soon as I get the chance, or on my own time. Async is sending a message and having a common understanding that an immediate response is not expected. Email is usually async. You send it and you expect an answer in a day or 2 or more. Recipient opens that email on their time and responds when they get the chance. Synchronous communication is sending a message and the recipient needs to process and respond in real time immediately. In a meeting with your team on Zoom, you say something, your team members receive and respond right away.When you take the time to think about it, most of what you do in your job could be done with a 1-way written update sent to a single person or a group of people, who can respond as soon as they get the chance. Obviously there’s times when there’s emergencies, or sometimes the nature of your work requires real time collaboration like live support teams or front line sales reps, and there’s different ways of tackling those situations than async.ExamplesInstead of saying: hey do you have 15mins to chat today About this project?Async is saying: here’s two questions I have regarding the last update you made on this project. Instead of saying: here’s an invite to a meeting where I’m going to walk you through a project update and I’m mostly going to be doing the talking, everyone will be seeing this for the first time and I’ll be asking for your attention for 1 hour and immediate feedback.Async is saying: here’s a short summary of a project update followed by a detailed overview of a problem I’m having and specific questions I’d like guidance on. Here’s what I’ve done so far, here’s when I need an answer by.BenefitsDeep work / flow stateA huge % of your workforce is introverted and perform better when they’ve had the chance to think before they are asked to give a response and give more space for flow/deep work.Tons of research shows that increasing response times allows people time to reflect and remove emotion from the equation thus making better decisions. Human centered way of workingAs one CEO, Sudeesh Nair, of ThoughtSpot, very active on Twitter about async, one of my fav quotes from him is: “…the ability to let people in whenever they want to work, however long they want to work in a day…that’s what asynchronous is about. If you think that way, you have to make more intentional changes in the work process, collaboration process, to enable every one of those people to come into the workforce.”Productive night owlsMany people are night owls. We’re all wired differently to be our most creative and intellectual during specific parts of the day, commonly, early morning and night.This is derived from chronotypes, our preferred sleeping patterns. But imagine forcing a pure night owl to work 9am to 5pm. And then giving this same person the ability to work 11-3pm and 9pm-11pm. The opposite is also true for ultra early risers like JT.Async teams give everyone way more flexibility to get their work done when they are more alert and productive. Just gotta strive for some overlap, you can’t NEVER have in-person meetings.Misconceptions / passing baton is too slow / project management tools suckPassing the baton with project management toolsThis might be hard for folks who are used to making decisions in a single room together and talking it out. Or if you’re used to getting answers to questions right away instead of spending time solo and figuring it out yourself. Consider this: globally distributed teams, who work async and master ‘passing the baton’, can get three times more done than a local team relying on everybody to be in an office between 9am and 5pm.This is something that Matt Mullenweg, Automattic CEO and WP founder has pointed out in a few podcasts. A local centralised company that runs on real-time noisy office environments with plenty of all too common consensus-seeking meetings cannot and will not survive in the next few years.Project management tools such as Asana are key to helping you run an async ship. How many sync/update meetings have you had where people go around the room one after the other updating everyone on their asana tasks when everyone knows they could’ve read up on those updates without a meeting. This requires diligence and it’s not for everyone. Project management tools often drive tennis games of back and forths. Avoiding tennis games of back and forthsOne of the biggest knocks against async is that it slows things down and often times, what could’ve been a simple pre-game discussion turned into a marathon tennis game of back and forth.Tips to avoid this:Give context, lots of context, make it skimmableGive action items, deadlines when possibleLevels of autonomy / How you can help change your orgMatt Mullenweg, Automattic/WP founder often talks about his levels of autonomy, it’s modeled after the self driving car level of autonomy. 5 levels:0 - Coffee baristas, construction workers. You need to be in a physical location to do the work.1 - Not remote-friendly, old school but in seats, company space, company time....

We're going to argue two main points: First, no-code is absolutely the future for marketing and that it opens up exciting possibilities (aka, democratizes digital marketing)Second, what really qualifies as a no-code tool is much more narrow and potentially useful than you might find elsewhere on the internetIs marketing hijacking another development trend and bending it to our own purposes? Is this an attempt to fit in with the cool kids by being part of a trend?Is the future of Martech no-code? Has it always been no-code?What does no-code really mean?Have you ever been half way through building something, a new campaign, a landing page you’re really excited about... but you hit a technical hiccup. “Oooh, might need a script for that” or “Damn, if only I could code”. As marketers, we’ve all felt this roadblock. We had a full episode dedicated to this-- episode #24: why marketers should learn to code. No-code is not using that excuse. Can’t code? Don’t know how to build scripts? No problem, there’s a no-code solution for that. Is Canva a no-code tool? Did you use code to create images in Photoshop or Illustrator? This is what tripped me up in the beginning — but Canva is one of the hottest tools today and it’s absolutely considered in the same breath as other no-code tools. While your typical definition of no-code would look at the ability to create software applications with a user interface, I’d argue that marketing’s use of no-code is a bit looser. I’d define a no-code solution as one that lowers the barrier entry to the point that you only need to use a user interface to complete your objective. No way am I going into photoshop - someone tried to teach me photoshop before and it was terrible. I’m not layering stuff — but Canva, I can get something good enough in minutes. These are pretty murky waters for us to be wading into — but such is this fascinating trend. So there's a cool difference between tools to build products and tools to sell products and run companies.no-code building / app development no-code martech / selling productsSometimes the tool to sell a product like a podcast (promoting or ads), might also be the product in some case, like us, not monetizing, just creating content. Example, Convertkit is no-code email marketing tool, unless you know css/html and you can totally customize things behind the scenes. Is Convertkit a no-code tool to sell a product/martech or is it building a product? Convertkit is is more than just an email marketing tool, it’s what newsletter creators use to build an audience and connect with fans, it’s an email designer, a landing page builder, a form builder and they are just diving into ecommerce. Isn’t every marketing tool a no-code tool? I’ve been using Marketo or HubSpot my entire career - turns out I’ve been using no-code tools my entire. But before I start congratulating myself on being on the cutting edge of this trend, I think it’s important we really sharpen our focus here. No code isn’t about using user-interfaces to accomplish a job — I think in the marketing context it’s about breaking the dependency on technical experts as well as subject matter experts. The idea of Canva as a graphic design tool may drive some designers crazy — but it’s borne out of a marketer’s need to get good enough now and not perfection later. I love this idea of breaking the dependency on technical and subject matter experts. This has been fascinating to watch in the indie maker community. Some call this the creator economy. Think there’s a lot of newsletters and podcasts already? Think again. Worldwide pandemics have accelerated remote work but they also motivated millions of people to become creators. More and more writers, teachers, film makers, photographers, artists all go DTC-- direct to consumer. Categories:Workflow automation — tools like Zapier allow you to configure automation without knowing any python or how to connect to APIsWeb development — tools like Wordpress or Webflow allow folks to create websites without getting mired in CSS or JavaScriptAnalytics — create reports and dashboards without being an analyst or having to fight with APIs — cough cough KlipfolioThe no-code category needs to be narrower to be relevant. I see lists all the time saying that tools like Slack or HubSpot are no-code. They are awesome tools — but no marketer is coding databases and setting up scripts to send our instant messages or emails — no developer either for that matter. Instead, to be relevant, no code martech tools need to replace or substitute the need for technical or subject matter expertise. Is no-code anti-code?The no-code movement is borrowed from development and is most certainly not anti-code. In fact, the no-code movement could be said to be pro-code! In development land, the idea of no code is to remove redundant and repetitive tasks from the coding process. For example, if you’re application requires online payment, you don’t want to get bogged down coding an payment system from scratch. You’d just plug into Zuora or Stripe. No-code is about reusing components that solve common problems so you can focus your development efforts on your secret sauce. I get a sense sometimes from marketers that we mix this up — no-code isn’t anti-code! You need code to build to build these tools.Developers don’t worry about no-code taking their jobs — in fact, most I’ve talked to love them because they can focus on writing dope code instead of solving redundant problems. Is marketing hijacking a development trend? Marketing loves technology. The CMOs budget has grown exponentially in the past 10 years, and this trend continues. The rise of Revenue Operations puts a mission behind all this software — and imbues those operational activities with a mission — to enable revenue generation.These twin trends supercharge marketing when it comes to getting exposed to new products and technologies. Naturally, marketing has picked up on the no-code trend and the question is whether this really applies. Is marketing hijacking a development trend? This is an interesting question. As someone who has dedicated a lot of time to learning to code, at first I felt that — yes, marketing is borrowing a buzz word so we could fit in with the cool kids at the lunch table. I’ve been digging in a lot deeper on this, though, and I’ve refined my perspective. I believe the no-code trend absolutely applies to marketing. The future of no-codeMartech is definitely heading into the no-code waters. I don’t think it’s a transformative force per se, but rather a rapid evolution of applications to make those jobs to be done easier, faster, and better. I don’t think folks working near marketing need to be worried -- marketers want to spin up a landing page with a form almost as fast as they want to tear it down and rebuild it. I think the benefit of no-code to experts who support marketers is they’ll work on more interesting, nuanced projects. Don’t build a landing page -- let’s build a custom product page or home page.I do think one potential downfall is that quality may drop in some areas. You can’t replace a great graphic designer with Canva -- the skills required to do this work are still important and are the difference between an Apple-esque brand and your friend’s yoga studio. But that’s the point -- it allows all of us the opportunity to build and sell our stuff on the internet. Even advanced no-code martech will still r...

Who built this? Why did they build this? What was the purpose of this?Sometimes, marketing can look a lot like archaeology. Unearthing ancient relics, reverse engineering them, and trying to understand how they were used by your ancestors. Like an ape discovering a tool for the first time, you look at them with a mix of bewilderment and awe. I didn’t know we were so advanced back in --- 2011.You’ve discovered a marketing artifact, and the internet is full of them. Form submits that go to legacy email automation systems, blog posts written before the last ice age, and strategies for a trend that went extinct long ago.As marketers, we need to be experts at carefully extracting these artifacts, evaluating their worth, and deciding whether to revitalize them or put them in a museum.Honestly, you’ll encounter this more in your career than you’d probably like, so we’re going to chat about how to work with marketing artifactsIn the world of tech startups, a lot of marketers only last a 12-18 months before they move on to their next position. They make a bunch of content, then move on, someone comes in to fill their role. This type of inheritance is super common in all areas of marketing. Why is this a problem?No one joining a marketing company wants to inherit someone else’s mess. It’s like renting an AirBnB and finding the dishwasher is still full of dirty dishes. At least, that’s the perception.The problem is that marketers love to create net new content. We’ve been programmed to think content is king -- and have responded by creating mountains and mountains of content. Most of us in marketing come from some form of content creation background -- it’s literally our instinct.Nothing sucks the wind out of a new job like cleaning up someone else’s mess. It’s easy for the content side to sweep things under the rug. But for tech systems, it’s way harder to clean up.You get this perception that tool X sucks or tool Y sucks.  I know you’re deeper in the ops area -- how often do you hear a new CMO or VP start looking to migrate off of marketo or hubspot or whatever?Yea very often. Senior leaders come in with the tools they are familiar with and demand a migration in the next year hahaI’ve had the experience of building on a fresh underutilized instance of PardotConfiguring and managing the Marketo beast you gave me the keys for at Klipfolio. Funny enough, now that you’re back at Klipfolio, you were stuck uncovering some of the webs I tangled.I’ve also had the migration side of this as well, while I was migrating out of Hubspot, you were migrating to Hubspot.Martech artifacts are everywhere! The maretch landscape of doom is growing everyday, and each of these vendors can easily be a failed trial. If it’s a free product, then you could be using it forever. One thing that really gets me is how underutilized existing software is before we start asking for budget for the next thing. I was the type of kid who had to finish each portion on my plate before I moved on to the next thing -- I’d eat my broccoli, then my potatoes, then my chicken.In marketing automation especially, you get players like Marketo / HubSpot that have so many features available out of the box. These features sometimes, however, aren’t as powerful as you can get from other tools. I noticed this with web personalization and forms.Hubspot has a blog CMS, they have email automation, they have forms, they have a CRM… they have something for everyone… That’s a really great way to make a mediocre tool. Everything is average to please the average user. We use 4 tools instead of Hubspot and they all give us features and powers that hubspot alone cannot.We moved our blog to Ghost which has a beautiful UX and writing experience for my content team and they were pumped to get out of the clunky HS CMSWe moved email automation to Customer.io, honestly my favorite email workflow building tool. Super intuitive and fast. I’m a huge fan of convertflow for forms, DriftRock a UK startup is also doing cool things with forms. No one wants to use a crappy tool.And obviously we use Close for our CRM. These 4 tools cost us less than hubspot alone cost us.Totally. Also, we all like shiny objects:I think the key is to identify areas where you want to bring in a new tool. Check your toolset out, and see if they have a version of that feature.Run a test or experiment, and validate your approach.Speaking of forms, what about the web form that submits to nowhere?When I migrated out of hubspot forms, Close had like 200+ ebook and gated content forms that I needed to re-create and map to a download link and a resource.Lots of companies don’t manage this well. Yeah, customer’s hate this -- it’s right up there with online chat that doesn’t connect with a live agent.This happens so often -- it’s not even funnyIt’s actually really hard to find things like form embeds on a website.I use a tool called screaming frog which has a custom extraction tool which allows you to specify different selectors to crawl your websiteThe other way to do this is to look at forms within your system and pull them out that way -- only works if you know all the systems at playYou’re giving me PTSD. Enough about marketing automation and let’s talk about the website.JT, I know you spend a lot of time in SEO land -- from talking with you I know you’re really big on updating existing content instead of just creating new content. Walk us through the advantages of that.Years ago I ran an experiment where I started updating existing content to see if I could improve traffic and rankings. What I found is that I could consistently move pages from 2nd page and beyond to the first page => this gave something like a 200-400% lift on conversions.SEO is like gardening. You don’t just toss a bunch of seeds in the ground and expect them to grow. You need to tend them and nurture them in order for them to growWhat about when the garden is overrun with weeds and the last gardener has skipped town?Resist the temptation to clearcut! There are often very valuable plants in that garden. As an SEO, you need to get good at determining which pieces of content are distractions and which pieces of content are really valuableUse search console’s GA plug-in to see conversion rates and trafficWhat types of problems do you see when trying to clear out the garden?Outdated messaging, positioningLanguageTrends that have diedJT, is there really value in updating and managing all this content? We live in such a transactional society, it’s almost always easier to create new.Heck yes it’s easier to start from scratch. I resist that temptation all the time -- it’s hard to look at a web page that is ranking on second page, figure out why it ranks, and how to preserve it’s ranking.There is a ton of value in this, however. I’ve seen first-hand how often a simple update can yield a big result. It’s way easier to improve the performance of a 2nd page asset than get a new asset all the way to 2nd page.I feel like it’s a skillset that you really need to work on. In my own career as a consultant and in-house marketer, I’ve almost always seen or been a part of website migration projects. I think this...

Jon and I are both pretty busy dudes. Jon a father, he works for Klipfolio, he’s a podcaster, he’s a consultant, he’s learning to code and he manages a community of marketers. Despite all that, JT still finds time to unearth the best UFO threads on Reddit and the dankest GME meme stocks. Phil is a husband and dog father (lolz)I work for Close, I’m a podcaster, I teach a post grad marketing certificate, I mentor local marketers, and I’m an avid member of several marketing communitiesDespite all that, I still find time to run a fantasy hockey league and binge all the best TV shows on Netflix.So how do we do it while staying happy and healthy (for the most part).Alright, I want to start by breaking down our weekly schedules by putting everything into 6 priority buckets:Family and friendsHealthLearningWorkChoresEscapism and hobbiesBeing productive and having an effective routine gives you room to fit things from all 6 buckets into your week.Sunday nights are for time blocking I like to plan my week on Sunday nights, that’s where I finish blocking time in my calendar. Might be controversial because of weekend but sometimes I have too many work things going on in my head before bed on Sunday, so planning my week before going to sleep is a great way to put my mind at ease.Go through the list of priorities, break them up into 1-2 tasks and block time in my calendar for it. As much as I can, I like to theme my weeks with 1 big thing I want to do. What’s my #1 focus.Key here is not over blocking. Leave some flex in there to move things around as things pop up during the week.Daily walks with my dogI split between 3 modes, 1 is podcast, 2 is music, 3 is just silence.Monday nights1 hour of shitty TV if I’ve worked on the cast.Tuesday and Thursday nightsTuesdays and Thursdays are usually blocked for reading. My wife is part of a book club and is an avid reader, so we try our ebay to turn the TV off on Tuesdays and open a book.I alternate between a book on Tuesday and on Thursday I learn something, right now learning Segment.js but have plans for SQL and deeper API.Wednesday nightsI usually plan a friends or family zoom call on Wed nights, I usually have no meeting Wednesdays so I’m happy to get some social time in the second half of the day.Something we want to try is everyone picking the same recipe, we open Zoom and watch each other chaotically build a recipe and eat together.Sometimes I’ll host a Zoom with friends and we watch a bunch of hockey games over screenshare.Friday nightsMost Friday nights are reserved for my wife, we’ll usually order in and watch TV or a documentary. ✌️--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus

What is the most important skill for an SEO? Technical, content, analytics, project management?Use google search to start - really look at results, what’s being displayed, what Google is automatically serving up => your job here is to intuit what Google thinks your users want.SEO is extremely competitive. I remember back when we worked together our competitors seemed to be running your playbook at the same time, and it made things tough. What’s your advice for competitive SEO? Look at the structure of the top few results on Google — What on-page elements are they using? What can you glean from the information architecture? I know you’ve tried or used most of the tools out there. For our listeners on a shoestring budget -- what do you recommend for analytics and reporting? Google Search Console and Google Analytics => This is a great feature and I’m shocked at how few people actually take the time to set this up.  So many quick tips -Set a filter to see things on second page. Sort to see top converting pages (tsk tsk set up goal tracking). Sort to see CTRs. Drill down into pages to see keywords. What about technical SEO? Everyone talks about it, but it’s I don’t think many people know how to improve this area of SEO. Google Page insights. Enter your site and see how it performs on mobile device. It gives a great print out of action items - such as sizing images, painting content before things load up. Lighthouse: Chrome developer tools and gives you a super technical review of your site.How do SEOs on a budget prepare for the future of search? Voice Search and Voice Utility. Mobile is king of SEO, and Voice is the next generation of search (still up for debate). If you ask Alexa or Siri or Google for an answer, voice search is at play. Structure your content for voice and you’ll be rewarded.✌️--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus